VIMS grad students help kids expand perception of scientists

Draw a ScientistWhen asked to draw a scientist, students typically depict a crazy haired white male in a lab coat mixing chemicals in beakers. A student from Chesapeake Bay Governor's School drew a scientist who “tried mixing two new chemicals together. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and exploded”.

Draw a ScientistAnother drawing of a wild-haired white male in a lab coat with a pocket protector and chemicals in beakers. This scientist is also studying a lab rat in a maze. The student artist from York High School described the scientist as being intelligent, wacky, and nerdy.

AfterIn this "after" drawing, a student from Chesapeake Bay Governor's School brings her scientist underwater to study marine life. “My scientist is studying whales to gain more knowledge about evolution. She is also comparing whale behavior patterns to humans.”

Before and AfterIn his "before" drawing, a student at York High School depicts a menacing scientist preparing to conduct lab work. In his "after" drawing, the student places the scientist outside, studying constellations in the nighttime sky.

Before and AfterA student at Booker T. Washington Middle School featured a male scientist in her "before" drawing and a female scientist in her "after" drawing. The female scientist is “testing water for pH, phosphorous, salinity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and mercury.” Overall, the ratio of male to female scientists dropped from 5 to 1 in the "before" pictures to 2 to 1 in the "after" pictures.

Children are natural scientists, frequently asking questions
about the world around them and how it works. But ask a child to draw a picture
of a scientist, and they will most often sketch someone who looks nothing like
themselves—an older white male with unkempt hair and a lab coat, holding a
beaker in his hand and pens in his pocket.

This narrow perception concerns educators and scientists
worried about the future work force, based on studies showing that children and
teens are more likely to pursue careers that provide role models with whom they
can identify. During the next 10 years, fully two thirds of the fastest-growing
occupations are expected to be in the fields of science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics.

Graduate students at the Virginia Institute of Marine
Science are now helping students in local middle schools and high schools to draw—literally—more accurate and positive conclusions about what scientists look like and
do.

The grad students are fellows in the VIMS GK-12 PERFECT
program, a 5-year partnership with middle- and high-school teachers and
students at 4 local schools.

Draw a Scientist

At the beginning of the school year in 2009, a trio of PERFECT
fellows—Lindsey Kraatz, Heidi Geisz, and Erica Holloman—asked the pupils in their
classes to draw a scientist. They also asked the pupils to describe their
drawing in words, to list 3 words that come to mind when they look at their
scientist, and to describe what their scientist does on a typical day.

The results were telling. Common adjectives were smart, crazy,
chemicals, mixing, nerd, weird, lab coat, old, lab work, hard-working, and
cool. The 6 classes that were tested depicted male scientists in 50% to 80%
of their drawings. The highest percentage of female scientists drawn by a class
was 30%, with the percentage in other classes ranging from less than 5 to about
15. Overall, the ratio of males to females in the drawings was 5 to 1.

By comparison, 30% of the faculty at VIMS is female, as are
62% of VIMS’ graduate students. Many scientists at VIMS spend as much time in
the field as they do in a lab, and very few carry pens in their shirt pockets
or wear pocket protectors. Most comb their hair at least occasionally.

A PERFECT solution

The PERFECT program—for Partnership between Educators and
Researchers for Enhancing Classroom Teaching—connects selected VIMS grad student
fellows with teachers and pupils at Booker T. Washington Middle School in
Newport News, Chesapeake Bay Governor’s School in Glenns (Rappahannock Community
College), Page Middle School in Gloucester, and York High School in Yorktown.
The schools serve diverse populations, from urban to rural, and with the number
of ethnic minorities ranging from 11 to 50 percent.

The program is the brainchild of VIMS professor Kam Tang,
Graduate Dean Iris Anderson, and Virginia Sea Grant educator Vicki Clark. Tang
says a key goal of the 5-year program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation,
is “to bring real-life scientists into classrooms in order to improve the K-12
curriculum and stimulate interest in science.”

Grad student Lindsey Kraatz, the driving force behind the “Draw
a Scientist” project, wanted to know whether that goal was realistic—whether
students would gain more interest in science and a more positive attitude
toward science and scientists by interacting with real scientists in the
classroom.

To test her idea, Kraatz asked Geisz and Holloman to join
her in the Draw a Scientist exercise, comparing their students’ initial drawings
and descriptions with drawings and descriptions done at the end of the first
semester. They compared the before and after drawings and verbal responses to
see how the students’ perceptions of scientists and science may have changed
after several months in a classroom with a practicing scientist.

Kraatz is using remote-sensing techniques to study sediment
transport in the York River. Geisz is studying the accumulation of persistent
organic pollutants in Antarctic seabirds. Holloman is studying the consumption
patterns of mercury in seafood by members of the local African-American
community.

Encouraging results

Kraatz says the results of the first year of the experiment
were encouraging. She says “The students in our classes came to see that
science was not as overwhelming as they initially thought, and they became less
apprehensive of science concepts and scientists.”

Kraatz notes that the “after” drawings tended to show
scientists in less traditional settings, such as in the water with SCUBA, and
without stereotypical scientific equipment like lab coats or beakers.

The adjectives the students used to describe their scientist
changed as well, with words such as weird, lab coat, old, and lab work dropping
away, to be replaced by words such as nice, experiment, chemicals, and fun. Use
of “nerd” dropped from 19% in the “before” descriptions, to 5% afterwards. In
general, positive words like “cool” and “fun” became more common, while use of
negative terms like “mad” and “stupid” decreased.

Student perception of the scientists’ gender also changed
during the study, with more drawings of female scientists. Overall, the
drawings’ male to female ratio dropped from 5 to 1 to 2 to 1.

Kraatz says the most important change she saw was that the
students’ “expanded their perceptions of what a scientist is or can be.” She was
particularly encouraged by “after” drawings in which the students drew
themselves as the scientist.

Encouraged by the results of last year’s preliminary study,
Kraatz is expanding and refining the Draw a Scientist experiment this year,
involving all but one of the 8 PERFECT fellows enrolled in the 2010-2011 program.
In addition to Kraatz, this year’s fellows are Sam Lake (Yorktown High School),
Daniel Maxey and Stephanie Salisbury (Booker T. Washington Middle School), Matt
Whalen and Lara Gates (Page Middle School), and Candace Spier (Chesapeake Bay
Governor’s School). The remaining fellow, Noelle Relles at CBGS, is not
participating because she has the same students as last year.